


hold the mirror up (to show me what I chose)

by limerental



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Battle of Sodden Hill, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, I shook a sorceress and intergenerational trauma fell out, Minor Character Death, Non-Explicit Sex, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-17 04:40:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29094390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental
Summary: Yennefer and Fringilla and a conversation at Sodden Hill.
Relationships: Fringilla Vigo/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 13
Kudos: 37
Collections: The Witcher Quick Fic #05





	hold the mirror up (to show me what I chose)

**Author's Note:**

> written for witcher quick fic!
> 
>  **content warning** for background character death and injury in the context of the battle of sodden hill/war in general, specifically there is a moment focused on the (offscreen) death of a child in battle

“You don’t have to fight anymore,” says the calm voice in the haze of the battleground. “In Nilfgaard, there are no limits. Only power. And potential.”

Exhausted and frayed, Yennefer stumbles and barely manages to catch herself on shaking limbs. The screams on the wind and in her mind have died to nothing, and she is unmoored and sinking into a black sea of hopelessness, only the approaching darkness left now, evening sky going red as blood.

 _Is this worth it?_ she thinks as she stoops beside yet another body, not one of her sisters but a young boy, angry burns charring the skin of his round cheeks. _Is this mercy?_ To stretch out this war into another string of battles, another offensive from a different angle, another slew of dead children, dead mages, dead soldiers? If Sodden Hill is defended and the enemy pushed back, what battleground will be born tomorrow? What other village or castle or road will be left in a scar of bloodied earth?

“You are beginning to understand,” says Fringilla, echoing from the hills. “The White Flame offers mercy to the people. It is the rulers of the land who will drive it to ruin.”

“Nilfgaard takes no prisoners,” Yennefer scoffs. “You know no mercy.”

“Slander!” the voice bellows. “If Nilfgaard shows no mercy, it is because ruthlessness is the only language that those in power in the North are willing to understand. You of all people must know how easily a rumor will be accepted as convenient truth.”

“You know nothing about me,” Yennefer says, but her voice has lost its strength.

“There need not have been a bloody war at all. But those who sit on their gilded thrones would rather cling to them to the death than do what is best for the common people.”

A vision of Fringilla flickers in the smoke from scattered fires, her robes plain and unbloodied, her dark hair and skin catching a sheen of firelight. Yennefer stands straight as much as she is able, swaying on her feet. In some ways, they have always been a mirror image of one another. The girl whose chaos crippled her and the crippled girl whose chaos made her new. The woman who went to Nilfgaard and the one who went to Aedirn. Two images, flickering reversed in a still pond.

“How can you offer power while decrying it in others?”

“There is no power in riches,” says Fringilla, her mouth twisting. “In excess.”

“Your Emperor dresses in rags like a common beggar, then? He lives in a threadbare manor? He rides with no pomp and ceremony?”

Fringilla laughs.

“Mind how you speak of him,” she says. “There is no hunger in Nilfgaard. No orphans dying in the streets. No plague and pestilence.”

“Sure there isn’t,” says Yennefer, “and any rumors to the contrary have been conveniently suppressed. I’m not an infant, Fringilla. We studied history as girls together. There are many accounts of your Emperor's ilk.”

“History is written by the victor,” says Fringilla. Slowly, she extends a hand, an offering for Yennefer to grasp. “Come,” she says. “Rewrite your history. I know you’ve done it before. Do it again. Choose victory.”

Sodden Hill is silent. Yennefer may be the very last yet alive and intact. She may be the last hope of the North. Or not. This all may be meaningless.

She takes Fringilla’s hand.

* * *

Yennefer steps from the dusk of the battlefield into the dormitories of Aretuza, shadows flickering along the arched stone walls. Fringilla sits cross-legged in bed wearing the simple nightclothes of their shared youth, her hair a wild frizz of curls around her shoulders. Her right arm lies folded over the left which is shriveled and deformed.

Yennefer walks with a limp.

“What is this?” asks Yennefer, startled by the unfamiliar slur of her words past the jaw she was born with. “Some trick to lure me in? We were never friends, Fringilla.”

“I’ve already lured you in,” says the other mage.

“Then why bother with these illusions?”

“As a girl, I hated you,” she says. Her expression of cool disdain looks strange on her younger self’s face. Fringilla had always worn a hint of nervousness, her confidence irreparably damaged by her initial embarrassment on their very first day of instruction. Her failure had been premeditated, made into a lesson. She bore the mark of that failure until her enchantments as she ascended remade her.

But not all scars could be undone so simply. Yennefer knew this.

“Well,” says Yennefer, “are you going to tell me how this is relevant?”

“I hated you, because you were always meant to usurp me. Tissaia’s darling pupil. She favored you. She pushed you until you broke in exactly the ways she expected.”

“You’re wrong. She was awful to me. Aretuza gave me nothing. I took what was mine myself.”

“Ha!” Fringilla’s laughter is loud and sudden in the quiet room. Some irrational anxiety that they will be punished for the volume after curfew sharpens in her chest, even knowing that this is not truly their adolescent dormitory. “If you really still believe things are so simple, then you’re more of a fool than I thought.”

Yennefer bristles.

“So you’ve come up with a pretty lie to make yourself feel better after I outwitted you. It’s pathetic, Fringilla.”

“You didn’t outwit me,” she says. “There was nothing clever about what you did. It was all brunt force. That’s your weakness, Yennefer. You don’t know how to do anything without making a spectacle.”

“I would rather that than be the lackey of a tyrant.”

Fringilla’s eyes flare with heat.

“The ends will justify the means,” she says. “When I first arrived in Nilfgaard’s court, I thought as simplistically as you.”

“What’s not simple about it? What you Nilfgaard mages engage in is horrific. Human sacrifice. Blood magic. Necromancy.”

“You limit yourself,” says Fringilla. “The Brotherhood has shackled you. Clipped your wings.”

“Who gives a fuck about them? I care about the Continent. Nilfgaard will burn it to the ground.”

“And what will arise from the ashes?” Fringilla unfolds her stockinged legs to stand from bed and step close to Yennefer. “Fire can cleanse. It is not destruction alone. The forest needs the flames, after all. Life is reborn from the ashes.”

“Pretty words,” says Yennefer, eyeing her carefully as she draws near. “Too bad it’s bullshit.”

“The White Flame could remake you once more, Yennefer,” says Fringilla. “You could be so much more.”

They stare at one another, wearing the faces of their younger selves as ill-fitting masks. Who are they beneath? Yennefer can no longer say. She has rewritten her course again and now found herself floundering. She does not know this woman who is her opposite, not really. She does not know herself.

It is Fringilla that reaches first with her ruined hand, touching the paralyzed side of Yennefer’s face. The nerves twitch under the touch of the wrinkled fingers, and she resists the urge to turn aside.

She does not miss the pain of her old body, does not truly know what she would choose if she could do it all over. Would she withhold the truth of her heritage or would it be revealed anyway in time? Would she go meekly to Nilfgaard or would she stride with twisted spine to stand before King Virufil and ask him for a dance?

Yennefer cannot say.

She is sorry for what Fringilla has become. Sorry for the winding paths that led the both of them here. Yennefer, devoid of all hope, left in a world which has little remaining for her, and Fringilla, clinging to a man as though he is a god, brimming with gleaming ideas about the future and her place in it.

Yennefer leans into the cold touch of the shrivelled hand, and Aretuza dissolves around them, giving to the interior of a canvas tent, lanterns flickering in bronze sconces. Fringilla is dressed in Nilfgaardian robes, her hair slicked flat to her head. The hand that cups Yennefer’s cheek is smooth and whole.

“You have a choice to make, Yennefer,” says Fringilla, her fingers flexing along the line of her cheekbone, her voice cold and unwavering.

This close to the other woman, Yennefer notices that for all that her plain dress does not differ from other mages of the South, Fringilla has neatly plucked the line of her eyebrows and wears the faintest sheen of gold at the hood of her lids. There is no shine of exertion on her brow, no stains of soot, no wisps of hair loose about her forehead.

Yennefer thinks how she must look in return, bloodied and exhausted. _For what?_ she thinks bitterly.

Fringilla stood by to watch from a distance while her army decimated Sodden Hill. Nilfgaard will name her a heroic victor, striking deep into the heart of the villainous North. The names of the dead will shrink into history.

Life will go on. Maybe, as Fringilla promises, the beggars on the street will eat like kings.

As girls, Fringilla had been studious and quiet, and for all of Yennefer’s blurry memories of juvenile dorm chatter and arduous dining hall banquets and dull daily lessons, she cannot place her in those memories with any surety. Was it Fringilla who had leaned close to offer bits of lewd gossip about certain Ban Ard boys while the other girls blushed and snorted? Was it Fringilla who had first concocted their scheme of sneaking from the dorm past midnight to swim naked in the dark water that surrounded the island or Fringilla who had ratted them out?

Even protected from the withering of age, a mage’s memory is fallible and limited. Spells exist to call to mind lost facts and figures and remember moments in perfect clarity, but the weight of so many years would crush if left in crisp detail.

Yennefer knows that history is the same. War. The rise and fall of empires.

Who will remember the dead boy she had stooped over on that charred field? No name to carve into a monument. No heroic battle won or lost. No legacy but what the crows take.

How will Yennefer be remembered?

Fringilla stares, her fingertips still pressed against Yennefer’s cheek, her expression blank.

Had their places been reversed, would they still end up here? Yennefer bare-faced in drab robes, Fringilla in blood-stained finery. Equals and opposites. One sinking into the muck so the other could flourish, but which is which? Which story will be remembered? The one where a crippled girl clawed her way to untold power and led an army to victory, scorching the ground before her to blackened rubble? Or a very different story that nevertheless follows the same threads?

Yennefer sways on her feet, the implications too vast, too dizzying, and Fringilla surprises her by catching her, her arms caught in a firm grip. She drops her forehead to Fringilla’s shoulder and smells the smoke from the fire trapped in the rough fabric, the only sign that the woman had been near a battlefield at all.

The tent magically muffles all sound from beyond the thin canvas, so they could be anywhere. No armies set to march. No pained wails from the field infirmaries. No corpses already attracting slinking necrophages as the night settles in.

“Fringilla,” sighs Yennefer and finds she wants to cry, her eyes prickling.

Soon, the poets will begin putting the events of these past days to music, the first to stitch the unspooled thread of history into something that lasts. But none will ever sing of this, Yennefer allowing her exhausted body to settle against the woman who should be her enemy, Fringilla’s hands softening down her arms, across the plane of her back.

“You can rest now, Yennefer,” says Fringilla. “Not everything in life has to be so difficult.”

What is remembered of the moments after is not written into the legends. There is no version of the story where the two women who have been made into enemies hold one another as lovers. Any bard educated in the way of narrative stylings would reject such events as trite and poorly-motivated.

No way to fit the quiet way that Fringilla’s lips press against the tears on Yennefer’s cheeks into a satisfactory tale. No sweet words to explain the tremble of their hands against bare skin. It would be easier if their coupling were brutal and violent, the clawing of fingernails and rising of passion in panting breasts. Love and hate, as any poet knows, are often two sides of the same coin.

But they do not hate one another. Not really.

They do not know each other well enough to manage hate.

Yennefer does not remember who conjures the bed, wide enough to sprawl and roll with one another, the linens soft against bare skin. She does not remember who first leans to press their full lips together, who decides to shuffle the sleeves of her dress down her shoulders and step free, who reaches for the swell of a hip, who pulls the other flush, skin to skin.

She thinks it happens in the way of tides, one pressing in while the other pulls elsewhere, phenomena that cannot exist without the other. The rise of the water defining the depth of the fall.

Fringilla holds her, and Yennefer echoes the embrace, intertwined. One sinking as the other sets.

They are not quite lovers, and this will not be remembered.

* * *

When it is over, Yennefer opens her eyes and stands alone on a field black with night, smoldering here and there with fire.

A dream. An illusion.

How long has she been kneeling here? How many hours has she lost?

In her mind, she hears the whisper of faint voices.

 _Yennefer?_ It is Tissaia, voice wrecked and ruined.

 _Yennefer,_ whispers Fringilla, and an echo of her warm breath ghosts against her throat.

She stumbles forward.

The memories blur in the conflagration that follows.

Details fade to ash.


End file.
